Weekly Breifly

0

Briefing/gorchov/9″/dt1st/mark2nd

When you move furniture, you’re also moving people and the job can get pretty stressful when customers aren’t packed and ready, or don’t want to pay. Manny Cukier, who owns Manny’s Famous Moving Co. in Pasadena, spoke with Jolie Gorchov about how he deals with customers in his furniture-moving business.

I don’t move anymore. I’m the quarterback, I’m too old to move furniture. We do over 40 moves a month, and sometimes we double that. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and I get my customers through word of mouth, through storage people, real estate brokers if you do a good job for a real estate broker they’ll send more people to you. I’ll tell you who’s good for referrals: divorce lawyers, they always know who’s moving. But the key is word of mouth.

After 16 years, I don’t have that many problems. But there are tough moves the toughest moves are because of bad access. You park in front of an apartment, you have to walk 100 yards to get to the door, walk up two flights of stairs, another 50 yards to get to the walkway on top. And then there’s miscellaneous junk, the little things when people don’t pack. My guys are out there picking up Hefty bags it’s amazing, people put stuff in Hefty bags for the movers to move. Last week, I had a one-bedroom, took eight hours because access was terrible. Another move was a three-bedroom house, it took five hours because they were prepared and had good access.

The more prepared a customer is, the quicker the move gets done. If nothing is ready, it costs a lot more money. Like, all the boxes should be sealed or we can only move one at a time. If you’re not going to be prepared, that’s OK too, we come there with tools and we can dismantle and disconnect anything. But it takes longer.

Sometimes we have problems getting paid. If the customer is a flake when my guys show up, they call me up, and I talk to the customer. It’s my job to weed the scammers out from the beginning. I tell the customer, “cash up front” we won’t move them if we don’t get the cash. Even if the job is booked by check, if my guys don’t think the customer can be trusted, we won’t do the job without cash.

This happens very little. I’m the one who books these jobs, and you’re not going to burn me. You can burn someone else, but you’re not going to burn me. You know why? Because we know where you live.

No posts to display